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The All-Red Route 100 Years On
An anonymous reader writes "On October 31, 1902, the first messages were sent along the All-Red Route -- a 5500km telegraph cable linking the whole of the British Empire. First envisioned in 1879, the long-decomissioned cable is still regarded as the longest single run of cable in the world."
An interesting article regarding the technology, business, and history behind laying of transcontinental cables is Mother Earth Mother Board, by Neal Stephenson. The tagline is "The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth."
This Wired Article by Neal Stephenson back in 1996 is all about the underseas fibre, the major players and what the world was like at the start of the web revolution. It weighs in at 56 pages (link to first page only).
In it he charts a new cable as it goes 28,000km around the world. Its well worth a read if you have time.
RTFA. The blurb was crap but the article is quite clear - the 5500KM Trans-Pacific Telegraph Cable linked Vancouver via Fanning and Norfolk Island, Fiji, to New Zealand and Southport, Queensland. Canada had already been linked to England via the Trans-Atlantic cable in 1866.
Just imagine the tension in such a long cable!
There are great tensions on cables when you roll them out on the bottom of an ocean. If the bottom is say 2 miles deep, then the top part must hold the weight of m2 iles of cable (minus the lifting force of the water). Creating cables strong enough was a great engineering challenge.
However, how long the cable is in total is utterly irrelevant - if the cable goes from the California to Hawaii or Australia does not matter.
Tor
Factoid: Did a little searching and found that APCN2 is the longest cable in the world sitting at 17000km long.